If you’re on a limited cellular data plan, one of the ugliest things that can happen is over-usage of data. Believe me, it happens a lot. One thing leads to another and then there’s this bunch of data I’ve consumed via mail, websites, Facebook, Instagram etc.

When it comes to mail, a lot of the emailers I receive have images that I don’t really need to load. I mean, how many times do you really need the images to load to read the entire message? How many times to do you just skip them over?

Images, especially on a retina display device like the iPhone 4, 4S, 5 and iPad, consume a lot of data. These are not your run-of-the-mill images but real high-quality stuff. Even if they’re just a few kbs at a stretch, think of the impact they can have when you load a lot of them via the Mail app?

There’s one particular way to address this issue. You can turn off these auto-loading images so they don’t end up eating your data.

Stop Images Loading Automatically in iOS Mail App:

Go to Settings

Tap on Mail, Contacts, Calendars

Scroll down and turn off Load Remote Images

Now, what happens when you open a mail in the Mail app is that none of the images load. When you want to load the images, you can tap on ‘Load All Images’ to load all the images at once. Or you can also specifically load each particular image of the email individually.

While there’s one benefit, there’s also one disadvantage.

The benefit is that a placeholder with the image’s name and size are shown. So you can be very specific about what images you load. Depending on the size, you can figure out if it’s worth or not.

The disadvantage is that when you have disabled auto-loading of the images, the emails with a lot of images in them might seem broken. You might better tap on ‘Load All Images’ in these cases.